What I Never Say Out Loud

What I Never Say Out Loud

By Rellé Shanae | Her Ink Bleeds

There are entire chapters of me

I’ve never read out loud.

Pages soaked in shame,

dog-eared by disappointment,

scribbled over with “I’m fine”

when I was anything but.

I am fluent in silence.

I speak it better than English.

Better than love.

Better than “help me.”

What lives in my silence?

A girl I used to be.

The one who smiled through pain so sharp

it could slice through steel.

The one who knew how to fake a laugh

while screaming inside her own skin.

I never say how tired I am—

not just body-tired,

but soul-tired.

Tired of shrinking,

of making room for people who never made space for me.

Tired of being strong

for everyone else

while I barely hold myself together in the dark.

I never say that sometimes,

being the “healer” feels like a curse.

That being the one people run to

means I rarely have a place to run myself.

That I’ve journaled things

I couldn’t even pray out loud.

I don’t say that I still carry

the weight of a “no” that wasn’t heard.

That I blamed myself

for things that were never my fault.

That I’ve walked into love

with bruises hidden under perfume

and makeup covering shame.

I don’t talk about the night

I sat in my car outside the house for an hour

just to gather the energy to walk inside

and pretend everything was okay.

Or how many times I’ve cried

on bathroom floors like altars,

begging for strength I shouldn’t have had to find alone.

There are parts of me I’ve hidden so long

even I forgot where I buried them.

Like the rage.

The quiet kind.

The kind that doesn’t slam doors or raise voices,

but simmers beneath politeness.

The kind that smiles in photos

and cries in showers.

That whispers,

“You forgive them, but who forgives you?”

I don’t say that out loud either.

I don’t say I shrink myself—

that I silence my opinions,

clip my wings,

dim my light—

just to feel tolerable.

And I definitely don’t say

that sometimes I crave solitude

not because I’m peaceful,

but because I’m tired of pretending.

You want to know what lives in my silence?

An archive of “what ifs.”

An ocean of held-back tears.

A closet full of apologies I never received

but somehow believed I owed.

My silence holds

every time I laughed at a joke that cut deep,

every “it’s okay” that wasn’t,

every “I love you” I gave

to someone who never earned it.

But also—

a softer voice.

One that’s been buried for years

under survival and performance.

One that’s starting to say:

“You deserved better.”

“You didn’t imagine it.”

“You are allowed to speak.”

Because I’m learning

that healing isn’t pretty.

It’s messy.

It’s snot-nosed, tear-stained honesty.

It’s admitting that sometimes

you’re still bleeding where you thought you healed.

It’s writing things down

because saying them still feels too dangerous.

But here I am,

trying.

Trying to say the thing

I was never supposed to say.

That I’ve been hurting.

That I’ve been hiding.

That I’ve been holding my breath for years

just to make other people comfortable.

And now?

Now I’m learning to breathe again.

So no—

I don’t always say these things out loud.

But they live in me.

They breathe through my poetry.

They sit in the ink of every letter I write

and every truth I bleed

when the world’s not looking.

Because maybe speaking it

doesn’t mean shouting it from rooftops.

Maybe it means

not denying it to myself anymore.

And maybe—

just maybe—

this poem

is my first attempt

at finally saying it.

Out loud.